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tsGL – An Experiment in WebGL

For quite some time now, I’ve been extremely interested in WebGL. Realtime, hardware-accelerated rendering embedded directly in a web-page? Sounds like a fantastic proposition. I’ve dabbled quite a bit in desktop OpenGL and have grown to like it, despite its numerous… quirks… so it seemed only natural to jump head-first into WebGL and have a look around!

So, WebGL!I was quite surprised by WebGL’s ease of use! Apart from browser compatibility (which is growing better by the week!) WebGL was relatively simple to set up. Initialize an HTML canvas context, and go to town! The rendering pipeline is nearly identical to OpenGL ES, and supports the majority of the same features as well! If you have any knowledge of desktop OpenGL, the Zero-To-Triangle time of WebGL should only be an hour or so!

Unfortunately, WebGL must be extremely compatible if it is to be deployed to popular web-browsers. This means that it has to run on pretty much anything with a graphics processor, and can’t rely on the user having access to the latest and greatest technologies! For instance, when writing the first draft of my lighting code, I attempted to implement a deferred rendering pipeline, but quickly discovered that multi-target rendering isn’t supported in many WebGL instances, and so I had to fall back to the more traditional forward rendering pipeline, but it works nonetheless!

A textured scene featuring two point lights, and an ambient light.

Enter TypeScript!I’ve never been particularly fond of Javascript. It’s actually quite a powerful language, but I’ve always been uncomfortable with the syntax it employs. This, combined with the lack of concrete typing can make it quite difficult to debug, and quite early on I encountered some issues with trying to multiply a matrix by undefined. By the time I had gotten most of my 3D math working, I had spent a few hours trying to find the source of some ugly, silent failures, and had decided that something needed to be done.

I was recommended TypeScript early in the life of the project, and was immediately drawn to it. TypeScript is a superset of Javascript which employs compile-time type checking, and a more familiar syntax. Best of all, it is compiled to standard minified Javascript, meaning it is perfectly compatible with all existing browsers! With minimal setup, I was able to quickly convert my existing code to TypeScript and be on my way! Now, when I attempt to take the cross product of a vector, and “Hello World”, I get a nice error in the Javascript console, instead of silent refusal.

This seems like a small difference, and honestly it doesn’t matter very much which method you use, but notice that property is specified to be of type string. If I were to construct an instance of MyClass and attempt to pass an integer constant, a compiler error would be thrown, indicating to me that MyClass instead requires a string. This does not effect the final Javascript, but reduces the chance of making a mistake while writing code significantly, and makes it much easier to keep your thoughts straight when coming back to a project after a few days.

Web-Components!When trying to decide on how to represent asset metadata, I eventually drafted a variant on XML, which would allow for simple asset and object hierarchies to be defined in “scenes” that could be loaded into the engine as needed. It only took a few seconds before I realized what I had just described was essentially HTML. From here I looked into the concept of “Web-Components” a set of prototype systems that would allow for more interesting UI and DOM interactions in modern web browsers. One of the shiny new features proposed is custom HTMLElements, which allow developers to define their own HTML tags, and associated Javascript handlers. With Google Chrome supporting these fun new features, I quickly took advantage.

Now, tsGL scenes can be defined directly in the HTML document. Asset tags can be inserted to tell the engine where to find certain textures, models, and shaders. Here, we initialize a shader called “my-shader”, load an OBJ file as a mesh, and construct a material referencing a texture, and a uniform “shininess” property.

Entities can also be fetched directly from the document, and manipulated via Javascript! Using document.getElementById(), it is possible to obtain a reference to an entity defined this way, and update its components! While my code is still far from production-ready, I quite like this method! New scenes can be loaded asynchronously via Ajax, generated from web-servers on the fly, or just inserted into an HTML document as-is!

Future Goals
I wanted tsGL to be a platform on which to experiment with new web-technologies, and rendering concepts, so I built it to be as flexible as possible. The engine is broken into a number of discreet parts which operate independently, allowing for the addition of cool new features like rigidbody physics, a scripting interface, or whatever else I want in the future! At the moment, the project is quite trivial, but I’m hoping to expand it, test it, and optimize it in the near future.

At the moment, things are a little rough around the edges. Assets are loaded asynchronously, and the main context just sits and complains until they appear. Rendering and updating operate on different intervals, so the display buffer tears like tissue paper. OpenGL is forced to make FAR more context switches than necessary, and my file parsers don’t cover the full format spec, but all in all, I’m quite proud of what I’ve managed to crank out in only ten or so hours of work!

If you’d like to check out tsGL for yourself, you can download it from my GitHub page!